Acting
Based on an eponymous novel by Veljko Kovačević. the series is focused on historical events and personalities from the uprisings in Gorski Kotar and the Croatian Littoral in the Second World War.
The main character is a young man who lives with his poor mother in Zagreb. He holds no job and is barely making ends meet in the overwhelming post-war poverty. They have a tenant named John. He is constantly full of money, which, allegedly, comes to him from America. The plot develops when John suggests to the young man that they rob the safe of a person known as Compadre, the same man who sent very youngster to be shot during the war, but he survived by sheer chance...
With WWI finally ending in 1918, Croatian journalist Kresimir Horvat travels from Zagreb to his village of Vucjak in Zagorje and becomes a witness of history as Austria-Hungarian Empire dissolves.
A theater premiere of Timon of Athens ends with a rapturous applause from the audience, and Boris, the lead actor (Boris Buzančić), is congratulated for having played the role of his lifetime. Encouraged by the sense of his own worth, he starts a romantic affair with a prompter, spurring gossip in the theater. The ensemble embarks on a tour, but as their performances achieve more success, Boris is becoming less liked among his colleagues, and he begins to experience the fate of the character he is playing...
The plot takes place in Croatia during and immediately after the April war in 1941. The protagonists are a group of soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army of Croatian nationality, some of whom will join the Ustashas and the newly founded NDH after the war, and some the anti-fascist movement.
By using the motifs of Krleza's play "Adam and Eve", written in 1922, director Tomislav Radic questions a similar pattern of male-female relations in a trivial, contemporary context. With Krleza's lines, Radic counterpoints almost documentary sequences from life, showing how Krleza's youthful distaste for the bourgeois concept of "love" can be actualized in a fundamentally different social environment.
